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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#151
post #9

I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?

We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…

So you have $125M in your bank account, you're fcf+ and don't need capital but decided to give up your equity for another $45M. so now you have $170M in your bank account yielding 0%, for which you paid the cost of your equity, which I can assure you is in the triple digits... because you wanted a techcrunch article for prospective customers and employees, which you could have spent A suggestion: if you want to really show progress and get a lot of press, do a buyback from employees/early investors instead. Signals to the world the level of confidence you have in your own stock.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#152
post #9

I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?

We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…

tbh, this is the way to go (as someone who is currently a CEO of a venture funded company). great job there! well done. lesson definitely learned.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to bui…

As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets) Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qual…

I feel like “vendor lock-in” is fundamentally different when you’re (a) not paying for the underlying libraries and don’t have to worry about future price hikes (b) can edit and modify the underlying source code to suit your needs.

It also seems like you and I are having very different experiences with how much boilerplate we need to write to get simple programs working. In streamlit[1] for example you can get a dashboard up and running in minutes.

[1] https://streamlit.io/

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